Starfishers Triology - Shadowline Part 22

He returned to the reports in his lap. Each was in Ca.s.sius's terse, cool style. The data and statistics summed an impossible a.s.signment. Meacham Corporation had gotten a long jump on Blake. Though they had the more fragile logistics, they had used their lead time well. They had put military crawlers into production years ago. Twenty-four of the monsters were laagered in the Shadowline a thousand kilometers west of Blake's shade station. They would be hard to root out.

Richard's supply lines, which also supported the Meacham mohole project at the Shadowline's end, could not be reached from Blake shade. They were too far into sunlight for even the hardiest charter to hit and run.

Ca.s.sius said there was a tacit agreement to avoid conflict Darkside. Blake would not hear the suggestion of direct strikes. He insisted that fighting be confined to the Shadowline.

"Idiots," Storm muttered in a moment of bloodthirst. "Ought to run straight to Twilight, kick a hole in their dome, give them something to breathe when they surrender, and have done." Then he laughed. No doubt Richard felt the same way.

Mercenary conflicts were seldom simple. Corporations, while willing to fight, seldom wanted to risk anything already in hand, only what they might someday possess.

The only positive he could see was that the Seiners were still out there somewhere, eager to ease his communications problem. It had been a lucky day when he had let emotion convince him that Prudie's people deserved his help. Those Fishers never forgot.

Darling Prudie. What had become of that sweet thing? She probably wouldn't let him see her now even if he could find her. Fishers didn't believe in fighting Nature. She would be an old woman. Storm shuffled reports, forced his thoughts back to the Shadowline.

He tinkered with Ca.s.sius's suggestion for cracking Richard's laager till the crawler reached Edgeward's tractor depot. He was sure it was a workable solution, though they would have to run it past their employer's Brightside engineers to be sure. And past the Corporate Board. Those sons-of-b.i.t.c.hes always had to have their say.

Blake met him personally. It was a small courtesy that impressed Storm because the man had to impose on his own handicap.

"Creighton Blake," the dark man said, offering a hand. "Glad you're here. You're recovered completely?"

"Like a new man. I've got good doctors." He glanced at the man behind Blake. He seemed vaguely familiar. "We've got the best facilities at the Fortress. You might want to try our regrowth lab."

"You know, I don't think so. I don't miss the legs anymore. And not having them gives me one h.e.l.l of a psychological advantage over my Board of Directors. They get to feeling guilty, picking on a cripple." He grinned. "You have to use every angle on these pirates. Ah. My manners. I'm not used to dealing with outsiders. We all know each other here. The gentleman with me is Albin Korando. He's my legs. And my bodyguard, companion, conscience, and valet."

"Mr. Korando." Storm shook hands. "We met on The Big Rock Candy Mountain. At the wedding."

Korando looked startled. He glanced at Blake. Blake nodded slightly.

"Yes, sir."

Storm smiled. "I thought so. We walk from here? Which way?"

"You've got a good memory, Colonel," Blake said. "I believe you met Albin for just a few seconds."

"Why?"

"Excuse me?"

"Why did you plant Pollyanna on me?"

"Ah? You know?" Blake chuckled. "Actually, you weren't the target. I had no interest in you at the time. Ground-zero man was your brother Michael. We almost stuck her to him, too. But you tipped the cart over."

"Long as we're being frank, would you mind telling me why?"

Blake explained. Before he finished, Storm again found himself regretting his contract to protect his brother. Michael had outdone himself here on Blackworld.

"About the Shadowline," he said, trying to ignore the curious hundreds watching them pa.s.s, "how much interference am I going to have to put up with? Ca.s.sius tells me you've ruled out direct strikes at Twilight, as well as any other armed action this side of the Edge of the World."

"This is between Blake and Meacham, not Edgeward and Twilight. We feel it's important to maintain the distinction. And we don't want civilians getting hurt."

Storm cast Blake a cynical glance, realized that the man meant what he said. The idea startled him. How long since he had worked for someone with a conscience? It seemed like forever.

Blake's humanitarian impulses could spell unreasonable casualties. "You didn't answer me."

"You won't have much trouble from me. I'm no general and I'm willing to admit it. But my Board won't make the same confession, as your Colonel Walters has discovered. They didn't want to release tractors for nonproductive employment. Maybe they thought you were going to fight on foot."

"How much voting stock do you control?"

"Thirty-eight percent. Why?"

"Any of the Directors your men?"

"I usually get my way."

"Will you a.s.sign me your proxy for the duration?"

"Excuse me?"

"One of my terms was five percent of the voting stock and a seat on the Board."

"That was rejected. Unanimously, I might add."

"Where's my headquarters?"

"Back at the depot. We set it up in an obsolete repair shed. Where're you going?"

"I'm going to pick up my toys and go home. I'm wasting my time here. I don't have a contract."

"Go home? Colonel Storm...Are you serious? You'd dump us now?"

"d.a.m.ned right I would. Things get done my way or they don't get done at all. I'm not Galahad or Robin Hood. I'm a businessman. My comptrollers will compute what you owe for transport and maintenance. I'll disregard penalty payments."

"But..."

"Would you like to test your meteor screens against a heavy cruiser's main battery?"

"We thought that was a giveaway clause, Colonel."

"There were no giveaway clauses, Mr. Blake. You were presented a contract and told it was a take it or leave it. In a seller's market prices get steep. You're hiring an army, not buying one crazy Old Earth shooter. Do you have any idea what it costs to maintain a division even on a peacetime footing? Win, loose, or draw, the Legion gets five percent, twenty-year deferred payments, expenses, equipment guarantees..."

"To be honest, Colonel Walters told us the same thing. We hoped..."

"Get somebody else. Van Breda Kolff is looking for something. But he won't be much cheaper."

"Colonel, you have us. We've got to have you. They'll cry a lot, but the Board will give in. Their fussing has put us so far behind now that it's criminal."

"I don't have time for games, Mr. Blake."

"They'll come around. They see the Shadowline slipping through their fingers like fine, dry sand. They want to get back what's been lost. You could hold us up for more and get it."

Storm saw that Blake was straining to control his temper. His Directors must have caused him a lot of grief.

He understood, once he was introduced to those select old armchair pirates. They were the sort who would buck a young whippersnapper like Blake simply because they resented his having come to power at such an early age.

Storm repeated his prima donna performance and stalked out. After what must have been a bitter hour of debate, Blake came to tell him they had acquiesced with the grace of virgins bowing to inevitable rape. Storm returned to the boardroom long enough to remind them of what happened to employers who defaulted contracts with the freecorps. Their bandit eyes became angry. He knew they had not surrendered completely.

He wondered why he bothered. The premonition could no longer be denied. Blackworld was the end. The last page of his story was going to be written on this h.e.l.l of a world. What matter a contract?

The Fortress, that was what mattered. Even if the Legion entire encountered its death-without-resurrection, there were still the people of the Fortress. The dependents and retirees needed support. He hoped Mouse could handle the asteroid. Dumping the administration of the empire into the boy's lap as he had...

His aide finished preparing his quarters. With Geri and Freki pacing him and the ravenshrikes watching with hooded eyes, he walked the floor and nursed "Stranger on the Sh.o.r.e" from his clarinet. He played it again and again, each time more mournfully than the last. He was exhausted, yet too keyed up to rest. His mind kept darting here and there like a fish trying to find a way out of its bowl.

Poor pretty Pollyanna. So young to be so driven. That Frog must have been something. He would have Mouse send her home. There was no point to her going on with her game.

Poor Lucifer. Played for a p.a.w.n. Pray it did not blind his sensitive poet's eyes. Maybe the boy would have sense enough to go with his talent now.

Poor Homer. Poor Benjamin. Gone to do hard time in the h.e.l.l of Helga's World. Could Ceislak get them out? Hakes was the most perfect of commando leaders, but his chances were grim. The Festung in Festung Todesangst was an understatement.

Poor Frieda. She was about to lose a husband she never really had. He had not been much good for her.

Storm could not think of his wife without guilt, though she was a soldier's daughter and had known, what she was getting into. Despite her peculiarities, she had been his best wife. In her way.

Poor everyone, Storm decided. There would be no winners this time. Not even the Sangaree Deeth. The shadow master was going to find the Shadowline a tool too hot to grasp. And poor Mouse was the dead-man's switch that would bring the Sangaree's folly home to him...

Storm finally relaxed enough to fall into a troubled sleep. His dreams gave him little peace. Only death itself promised that.

Forty-Two: 3031 AD

Storm stayed clear of the tractor driver and asked no distracting questions. The briefing had made it clear that operators needed their full attention all the time. Storm's head and eye remained in constant motion as he both familiarized himself with the instruments and displays and observed the economy of motion with which the professional operator managed his crawler.

Storm gasped in awe when the convoy began its run to the Shadowline. He had never seen anything like this. Brightside in description was nothing compared to the h.e.l.lish reality. He could not begin to imagine what it must be like beyond the interface of instruments and filters. A kilometer-long lake of molten metals slid past. He glanced at a rear-view screen and saw high-melting-point trace metals form a sc.u.m in the convoy's shadows. This much heat was impossible to conceive. The convoy consisted of fifty crawlers jury-rigged to transport troops and cargo. Ideally, they would have deposited their cargoes at the foot of the Shadowline and allowed the Legionnaires to proceed from the shade station under their own power. However, Storm and Ca.s.sius did not trust the vacuum-proofing of their equipment to withstand the punishment of the journey out to the Shadowline. They had elected to transport it all the way.

It would take months to move the legion that way. Every crawler outbound since Ca.s.sius's arrival had been ferrying, yet only half the Legion was in the Shadowline. The force Storm was taking out to the point of confrontation consisted of a battalion each of engineers, artillery, armor, and infantry. Support troops would be distributed along the way. He had no intention of fighting immediately. The combat troops were along only to protect the engineers, who would prepare his move against Richard's roadblock.

Ca.s.sius had been laying logistical groundwork from the beginning. He had set up major depots each hundred kilometers, scattered secondary depots in between, had erected hospital domes, recreation domes, and had set out thousands of small inflatable emergency shelters so men working in s.p.a.cesuits stood a chance if something went wrong. He had set out a galaxy of communications repeaters and transponders, had widened the extant road, and had charted the most defensible terrain.

The more constrained the battlefield, the more meticulous and extensive was the preliminary work. Ca.s.sius was a sound detail man. Given the help of the brothers Darksword, and time, he would prepare down to the last sh.e.l.l for the explosive-type artillery Storm had selected as his main heavy weaponry.

Already the Shadowline is cluttered, Storm thought as he studied the screens. Near its foot every square meter of shade was in use. And the work had scarcely begun. It would be a month before they were ready for even limited action.

How much more trouble was in it for Richard? His lines were tremendously more extensive.

Storm's scouts encountered hostile pickets twenty-five kilometers from Richard's laager. He stopped and dug in while the infantry went out as skirmishers. He distributed the artillery so it could hammer any enemy probe. The armor he tucked away well behind his front, as a reserve to be deployed against any breakthrough.

For the present only Richard would be doing the attacking. And Storm thought that unlikely. Hawksblood's mission was defensive. His task was to prevent interference with the Meacham project at Shadowline's end. All he needed to do was sit and let things happen.

After establis.h.i.+ng his position, Storm concentrated on outflanking Hawksblood from the more difficult direction.

Hawksblood would antic.i.p.ate a circling strike. He would have his heaviest weapons positioned to repulse anything coming out of the sun.

Fifty kilometers to his rear Storm's engineers exploded charges which demolished a hundred-meter-wide stretch of bluff, spilling megatons of rock into shadow. The engineers had estimated that it would take a month to clear the rubble, then five to ten days to grade a crawler road to the high side of the cliffline.

Storm was not sure taking the high ground would help.

It would be pure p.i.s.sing into the wind if Richard figured out what was happening-and it could turn into disaster if Hawksblood antic.i.p.ated the maneuver and was waiting for it.

It was more promising than the alternatives. Attacking out of sunlight would be expensive and dangerous. Attacking straight up the Shadowline would be suicidal.

The positional and equipment advantages were Hawksblood's. Nevertheless, Storm believed he could win. One way would be to go all out, attacking with the Legion's full might. That would force a war of compet.i.tive consumption, of attrition. The sheer magnitude of Richard's logistics would betray and defeat him.

That way meant a bloodbath. Storm did not want one. Neither did his opponent. Theirs were wars of maneuver, not of slaughter. They were in the business for financial gain, not for blood and glory, not for some shadowy concept of honor or duty or patriotism, nor even for the latest in ideological fads. Their men were good soldiers. They knew how and when to keep their heads down. They knew how to stay alive and that was their primary bet in the battlefield sweepstakes. They would do their jobs with a cool professionalism and weigh each risk against the importance of the goal they were being asked to achieve.

They were the best and worst, according to one's viewpoint. A man could hire them and get a nice, clean, efficient job done quietly and quickly. A politician could rant and rave at them, exhort them, cajole them, inundate them with all the magic catch-phrases and righteous lies, and not get them to look up from their card games.

The characteristics of the Shadowline battleground left very little room for traditional mercenary finesse.

Hawksblood's detection equipment proved sensitive enough to isolate the explosion tremors from ambient thermal gradient noise in the planet's crust. He pushed a reconnaissance-in-force westward. Storm's artillery and mine fields stopped it. Hawksblood left a wrecked military crawler's slave sections behind. Storm studied them, comparing them with the handful Blake's crawler factory had produced.

He did not find much difference. Both manufacturers had stuck with a basic pumper design, modifying the slaves to carry armor and extrudable weapons turrets. The Meacham variety revealed somewhat less designer concern for the safety and comfort of the fighting crew.

"He may try flanking us now," Storm told Helmut Darksword, who was in charge east of the rockfall. "Watch for him coming out of sunlight. Keep him from spotting the fall."

"I think we'll get enough warning on the ground-noise sensors."

The command setup had been arranged so that Storm and Ca.s.sius would take turns controlling the schwerpunkt while the brothers Darksword would take turns directing operations in the support zone. The off-duty commanders would return to Edgeward City, to oversee the Legion's interests there. Storm's son Thurston directed the permanent communications and liaison team stationed in the city.

Helmut's defenses were anch.o.r.ed upon a battery of heavy lasecannon uns.h.i.+pped from a Legion cruiser. They were the only weapons Storm had which could engage a vehicle in daylight. Explosive sh.e.l.ls, so effective in the shade, exploded a few meters after entering sunlight. Lighter laser weapons did not have enough power to punch through a crawler's heat screens.

What would Richard do if he discovered the notch in the cliffs? Move his laager back? Storm did not think so. That would be an admission of defeat. The maneuver could be repeated indefinitely, forcing Hawksblood to withdraw again and again. It might take years, but Richard would eventually run out of room to back up.

Would he come from Brightside, in force, to isolate the force screening the rockfall? That might work if he moved before the debris was cleared, so that units not inside crawlers could not retreat. But it would mean a b.l.o.o.d.y fight.

He might do nothing, hoping Storm would make a self-defeating mistake before his scheme came to fruition.

Storm favored the latter possibility. That was Richard. Hawksblood was a master of the art of doing nothing. He liked to wait till an opponent became committed before making a move himself.

Storm called the officer commanding the engineers. "Dahlgren, I hear you've got a problem back there. What's wrong?"

"Sorry, Colonel. It's bad news. We're going to take a lot longer than we figured."